Ghana's Big Push: what it will really take to build roads that last

If you have driven from Accra to Kumasi recently, you know exactly what Ghana's road problem looks like from a car window. One moment, you are cruising on a newly laid surface that feels almost European. Next, the tarmac gives way to a cratered stretch that forces drivers into a slow, suspension-testing crawl. That contrast captures nearly six decades of national infrastructure policy in a single journey: bursts of ambition, periods of neglect, and the persistent gap between what Ghana promises and what it actually delivers.

The current government's Big Push initiative is the latest attempt to close that gap. It is more systematic in scope than previous road programmes, and its economic logic is sound. What has not yet cracked are the stubborn institutional, financial, and human capital problems that have derailed every similar effort before it. This article examines those challenges honestly, draws on experiences from Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, and maps out what needs to change if the Big Push is to be something more than another round of ribbon-cutting followed by quiet deterioration.

The central problem is not a lack of policy ambition or even insufficient funding on paper. It is the persistent gap between what is planned and what is actually delivered.

A Road Sector Built for Export, Not for People

Ghana's road network was not designed with Ghanaians in mind. The colonial infrastructure was engineered to move cocoa and minerals from the interior to the coast and out of the country. Roads connected production zones to ports, not communities to each other. That extractive logic left vast inland areas effectively cut off, and those connectivity deficits have proven remarkably durable across independence, structural adjustment, and democratic transition alike (Kingombe, 2014).

Through the 1970s and 1980s, economic crisis and the conditions attached to structural adjustment lending pushed road maintenance well down the priority list. International creditors demanded fiscal discipline, which in practice meant cutting capital spending, since deteriorating roads reveal their damage slowly, while immediate cuts show results quickly in budget figures. Bridges washed out. Feeder roads became impassable tracks. A maintenance culture that should have developed with the network simply never took root.

When economic stabilisation began in the mid-1980s, roads emerged as a stated priority, and the establishment of the Road Fund in the 1990s was a genuine institutional innovation. Collecting dedicated revenues through fuel levies gave maintenance a more predictable financing base than annual budget allocations could provide. But the fund was persistently under-capitalised relative to the growing network, and it faced recurring raids on its resources during fiscal pressure, weakening the very predictability it was meant to guarantee (Tetteh et al., 2021).

Each subsequent government has announced its version of a roads programme with great fanfare. The 'Year of Roads' campaigns of the early 2000s generated genuine public expectation and then genuine public disappointment. By the time the Big Push was unveiled, Ghanaians had absorbed enough broken promises to be sceptical. That scepticism is rational and, frankly, earned.

The Economic Case Is Real, but It Needs Honest Context

The Big Push draws intellectual legitimacy from development economics going back to Paul Rosenstein-Rodan's original formulation in the 1940s: coordinated investment in infrastructure creates the conditions for broader economic transformation that piecemeal investment cannot. That logic holds. Poor road access costs Ghana real money in ways that are measurable.

Farmers with poor road access lose between 30 and 40 percent of perishable crops to spoilage because they cannot reach markets in time. They respond rationally by shifting to less perishable but also less nutritious and less profitable crops, or by simply producing less. Manufacturers in poorly connected areas report that transport costs can consume 20 percent of their production costs, compared with single-digit percentages in better-connected countries. That cost disadvantage makes competing with imports difficult and exporting near-impossible. Regional economies remain isolated from national growth, and that isolation maps troublingly onto ethnic and political geography (Abane, 2009; Kingombe, 2014).

World Bank and African Development Bank research suggests that improving road quality in sub-Saharan Africa could raise agricultural productivity by up to 30 percent through reduced transport costs, lower spoilage, better farmgate prices, and improved access to inputs. In a country where agriculture employs close to half the workforce while contributing less than a fifth of GDP, those productivity gains translate directly into poverty reduction.

The fiscal context, however, complicates delivery considerably. Ghana's debt-to-GDP ratio has crossed 80 percent by some measures, requiring IMF intervention to restore macroeconomic stability. Debt servicing now absorbs more than 40 percent of government revenue before any other priorities are addressed. When budget releases are delayed, which happens often, contractors stop work to avoid indefinitely financing construction from their own pockets. Equipment sits idle. Skilled workers find other jobs. By the time funding flows again, the restart costs and contractual disputes consume whatever was saved through delayed payment (Tetteh et al., 2021).

Tax revenues remain stubbornly below 15 percent of GDP, well short of the roughly 20 percent that development economists consider necessary for sustained infrastructure investment without excessive borrowing. With roughly 80 percent of employment in the informal economy, the tax base is narrow, and enforcement is weak. Those structural constraints are not going to disappear in the near term, which means infrastructure ambitions must be sized and sequenced accordingly.

Debt servicing absorbs over 40 percent of government revenue before anything else is addressed. When releases are delayed, projects stall, workers leave, and restart costs consume whatever was saved.

What Is Actually Going Wrong on the Ground

The Payment Problem
Talk to any contractor working on Big Push projects, and the conversation quickly arrives at the same place: Interim Payment Certificates take months to process through multiple layers of approval, and by the time payment arrives, the contractor has already covered costs from working capital or expensive bank credit. Smaller local firms, which lack the financial reserves of international contractors, sometimes abandon projects outright, triggering disputes and further delays (Agboyi et al., 2014).

The payment chain has genuine logic to it: site engineers certify completion, quantity surveyors verify measurements, agency management reviews the submission, the Ministry of Roads and Highways provides clearance, and the Ministry of Finance processes payment. Each stage has a purpose. The problem is that documents can sit at any stage for weeks without movement, whether because of genuine technical review, genuine capacity constraints, or the informal payment demands that sometimes accompany document processing. The system lacks both the digital infrastructure and the enforcement culture to make these timelines stick.

Three Agencies, No Coordinator
Ghana's road sector is divided among three central bodies: the Ghana Highway Authority manages trunk roads between major cities, the Department of Feeder Roads handles rural access routes, and the Department of Urban Roads manages city networks. Each operates with considerable autonomy, distinct procurement rules, and separate ministerial reporting lines. The specialisation makes technical sense. The coordination failure does not (Ofori-Kuragu et al., 2016).

When the Big Push was announced, no single authority had the mandate or capacity to oversee its implementation across all three domains. Budget allocations happen separately, making flexible resource shifts difficult when implementation rates vary. Procurement is handled independently, preventing bulk purchasing and forcing contractors to navigate three systems. When a problem crosses agency boundaries, which is almost inevitable on a major road project, there is no single authority empowered to resolve it. The result is that accountability gets diffused precisely when it needs to be concentrated (David & Derrick, 2018).

The Contractor Capacity Gap
The Big Push involves projects of a scale and complexity that exceeds the current capabilities of most Ghanaian construction firms. Multi-lane highways require sophisticated pavement design. Complex interchanges demand precise geometric calculations. Bridges spanning more than 50 metres need advanced structural engineering that comes from years of accumulated experience. International contractors possess these capabilities. But their involvement raises costs substantially, since they must mobilise equipment and expertise from outside Ghana, and they have limited interest in building local capacity that might create future competition (Wireko, 2020).

Ghana has many competent small and medium contractors capable of routine maintenance and minor rehabilitation work. The problem is the distance between what they can currently do and what large-scale infrastructure programmes require. Bridging that gap takes deliberate, sustained investment in development pathways, not just training workshops.

No Clear Definition of Success
Perhaps the most fundamental gap is the absence of a robust framework for defining and measuring whether road projects actually succeed. The current system rewards output: kilometres constructed, contracts awarded, ribbons cut. It pays far less attention to outcomes: whether roads are durable, whether they are maintained, whether they reach the communities that need them most, and whether they deliver the economic connectivity that justified the investment in the first place. A project completed a year late at full cost may represent better value for money than one delivered on schedule with materials that begin failing within eighteen months (Dansoh et al., 2017).

Five Pillars That Must Work Together
Addressing these challenges requires a framework that takes their interconnected nature seriously. Fixing financing alone will not solve delivery if institutions are fragmented. Better technology will not reduce leakage if procurement governance remains weak. None of it matters if the people executing projects lack the skills to execute them properly. Based on comparative analysis and Ghana's own institutional context, what follows identifies five pillars that must be strengthened together, not sequentially.

Pillar One: Institutional Governance
The most pressing institutional need is a coordination mechanism with genuine authority. A dedicated Big Push Delivery Unit, housed within the Ministry of Roads and Highways but operating with enough autonomy to be insulated from routine political interference, could serve as that mechanism. Its role would not be to duplicate what the Ghana Highway Authority, the Department of Feeder Roads, and the Department of Urban Roads already do, but rather to convene them, track aggregate performance, and escalate blockages that no single agency can resolve on its own.

Kenya's National Highways Authority and Rwanda's Road Maintenance Fund Board offer instructive models: coordination bodies that genuinely enhanced sector performance without requiring wholesale institutional restructuring that would have taken years and enormous political capital. The lesson from both is that such units work best when they have clear performance contracts linked to measurable outcomes, actual authority to convene and escalate, and consistent backing from senior political leadership (Mohamed, 2023).

Public dashboards showing real-time project status, citizen feedback lines for reporting quality issues, and regular media briefings transform accountability from periodic formal exercises into continuous pressure. This external accountability channel often works faster than internal audit cycles, simply because visibility changes behaviour.

Pillar Two: Financial Sustainability
Financial sustainability is not simply about allocating more money to roads, but important as that is. It is about institutional arrangements that ensure committed funds actually flow to projects when needed rather than disappearing into midyear expenditure adjustments. Ghana's Road Fund is a partially successful model: dedicated revenues through fuel levies provide a more predictable financing base than annual appropriations. But its capitalisation is insufficient, its mandate excludes new construction, and periodic diversions have eroded the predictability it was meant to protect.

Expanding this concept into a comprehensive Big Push Infrastructure Fund, established by legislation with ring-fenced revenue streams and independent board governance, would provide the multi-year planning horizon that large infrastructure projects require. Revenue sources could include expanded fuel levies, vehicle registration fees, tolls on major highways, and infrastructure bonds marketed to pension funds and institutional investors who need long-duration assets (Tetteh et al., 2021).

Escrow arrangements for individual projects, where funds are deposited upfront with an independent trustee and released directly upon verified milestone completion, address the payment delay problem at its root. Nigeria and Tanzania have implemented such systems with measurable improvements in contractor cash flow and project continuity. Well-structured public-private partnerships can supplement public financing for certain project types, though Ghana's experience highlights the importance of realistic risk allocation and strong transaction management capacity from the outset (Giti et al., 2020).

Pillar Three: Technological Integration

Technology can make dysfunction visible and harder to sustain, but only when it is thoughtfully embedded in real institutional workflows. GHANEPS has genuinely improved procurement transparency by publishing tenders and awards online. Its current limitation is that visibility ends at contract signature. Extending the platform through contract management, progress monitoring, and payment processing would create end-to-end transparency from tender to handover (Addo, 2022).

GIS-based road asset management transforms network oversight from reactive crisis response into proactive planning. Building Information Modelling for complex projects enables engineers to identify design conflicts digitally before they become expensive site problems. A digitised payment tracking system, one that generates automatic alerts when any approval stage exceeds its specified timeframe, would not eliminate every delay, but would make delays visible and attributable. That change in visibility changes incentive structures in ways that broad policy statements cannot.

The temptation in digital transformation is to procure sophisticated systems and assume adoption will follow. It rarely does. Ghana's approach should emphasise incremental implementation: pilot with flagships, build internal technical capacity, demonstrate value, then scale. Systems that agency staff do not understand or trust will be circumvented, however advanced they are (Wireko, 2020).

Pillar Four: Capacity and Human Capital

No procurement reform or monitoring platform can substitute for capable engineers who design quality projects and competent contractors who execute them properly. Ghana has trained civil engineers and surveyors. What it lacks is a sufficient number with experience on large-scale, technically complex projects, and a contractor grading system that actively develops firms toward higher capability tiers rather than simply classifying them as they stand.

A structured capacity-building programme would include diagnostic assessments identifying specific gaps, targeted training through partnerships with technical universities, and mentorship arrangements pairing international contractors with local firms as an explicit condition of contract awards. Financial support mechanisms, including guarantee funds for performance bonds and equipment financing, could accelerate progress up the capability ladder, with subsidies tied to performance rather than participation alone (Chebet & Rotich, 2015).

Public-sector capacity deserves equal attention. Retaining talented engineers and project managers in government service requires career progression pathways that reward technical excellence, competitive compensation relative to private-sector alternatives, and continuous professional development. When the best professionals leave for the private sector, the institutional knowledge they carry with them is very rarely documented and very rarely replaced.

Pillar Five: Stakeholder Collaboration

Road projects exist within complex webs of interest. Farmers whose land is acquired, traders facing construction disruption, traditional authorities whose consent can determine whether a project moves smoothly or bogs down in community resistance, civil society organisations monitoring environmental compliance, and communities who will ultimately use and maintain the infrastructure all have legitimate stakes. Treating stakeholder engagement as a bureaucratic sign-off to be obtained before implementation begins is a recipe for delays and resentment.

Cross-agency coordination within government is just as important. The National Development Planning Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Ministry of Roads and Highways all touch major infrastructure projects. When they work in silos, approvals compound rather than run in parallel, and project timelines slip accordingly. Community participation in feeder road programmes, where hybrid models allow communities to provide oversight and contextual knowledge while professional contractors handle technical execution, has shown particular promise in agricultural areas (Abane, 2009).

Why These Five Pillars Cannot Be Separated

The five pillars outlined above are not independent levers that can be adjusted one at a time. They function as an integrated system where weakness in any one area constrains performance across all the others, while genuine strength in one creates positive effects elsewhere. This is worth stating explicitly because infrastructure reform programmes routinely fail by concentrating on a single dimension while neglecting the rest.

Table 1: Cross-Pillar Interdependencies and Synergies

What Needs to Happen, and When
Moving from analysis to action requires sequencing that respects political realities, institutional capacity constraints, and the need for early wins that build credibility for deeper reforms.

Table 2: Phased Implementation Roadmap for Big Push Success Factors

The Honest Assessment
Ghana's Big Push can succeed. That is not blind optimism; it is a reading of what comparable countries have achieved when they combined political will with institutional discipline and genuine investment in people. Rwanda rebuilt its road sector under constraints that were, in many respects, more severe than those in Ghana. Kenya's infrastructure programmes have delivered real connectivity improvements despite significant governance challenges along the way. Knowledge of what works is available. The policy templates exist. The question is whether Ghana can sustain the institutional commitments required through political transitions that have historically disrupted momentum and erased institutional memory.

The proposed Big Push Delivery Unit is not a magic solution. It is a practical coordination mechanism that can work within existing institutional structures without requiring the kind of wholesale restructuring that would take years to negotiate and implement. Its effectiveness depends entirely on whether it receives genuine political backing from the highest levels and whether it operates with enough autonomy to function when bureaucratic or political convenience would prefer it did not.

Financial sustainability requires moving decisively away from annual budget cycles as the primary funding mechanism for long-term infrastructure investment. Dedicated financing vehicles, whether through expanded road funds, infrastructure bonds, or well-structured public-private arrangements, need to be insulated from the fiscal pressures that have repeatedly undermined predictable project financing. None of those matters, however, unless payment discipline is enforced and contractors receive compensation promptly for verified work.

Success in road infrastructure should ultimately be measured not in kilometres built but in the durability of those kilometres over decades, the market access they create for farmers and manufacturers, the capability of Ghanaian contractors and engineers developed through implementation, and the institutional strength accumulated through successive projects. These are harder metrics to track and less photogenic than ribbon cuttings. They are also the ones that determine whether this initiative represents genuine transformation or another chapter in a long story of unfulfilled promise.

Knowledge of what work is available. The question is whether Ghana can sustain the institutional commitments required through political transitions that have historically disrupted momentum.

Ghana is at a real inflection point. The Big Push represents a genuine opportunity, not just another policy document. Realising that opportunity demands commitment to excellence over expediency, transparency over opacity, and systems over personalities. If Ghana can hold that focus while learning systematically from both its successes and its failures, the infrastructure transformation that has long remained just out of reach becomes achievable.

About the Author
Surv. Dr. Emmanuel Norgah Bukari is Chief Quantity Surveyor at Ghana's Ministry of Roads and Highways. Correspondence: benorgah@gmail.com

Disclosure
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not represent the official position of the Ministry of Roads and Highways or any other government body.

   Comments0